While you were putting your dreams of a World Cup final to bed, innovation was smashing particles together at an amazing rate, ruminating over the fallout of the BP oil spill, and fiddling with its new smartphone.

While you were putting your dreams of a World Cup final to bed, innovation was smashing particles together at an amazing rate, ruminating over the fallout of the BP oil spill, and fiddling with its new smartphone.

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1. It’s been 69 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, and the bigger questions are now being asked. As BP’s situation begins to hit hard on the trading floor, pointy fingers are moving away from Tony Hayward and settling, Donald Sutherland-like, over his predecessor, John Browne. The Los Angeles Times shows just how wide the oil firm’s tentacles spread in everyday life, indicating that anyone who wants to boycott BP products will have a hard old time of it. And the Guardian has a profile of Texan lawyer Brent Coon, who is helping small-time claimants whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the spill, get compensation.

2.The G20 summit in Toronto is in full flow and, in between the riots and the helicopter pool, Afghanistan was top of the agenda. Obama is urging the G20 nations to spend their way out of the recession, although some countries are resolutely tightening their belts.

3. For Bob Bradley‘s U.S.A. and England, the World Cup is over. They are to be joined at the airline check-in by Mexico, who succumbed 3-1 last night to an impossibly rampant Argentina. And the talking point of the tournament has switched from the Jabulani ball to the lack of technology in the tournament. All that Sepp Blatter, FIFA head, and his minions seem to be talking about is an extra official at the moment. We want technology! We want homing pigeons in the ball! We want FaceTime, gyrometers and all of that kinda stuff in the goal mouth. And we want to at least get to the semis next time.

4. Speaking of iPhone 4, Apple is, as ever, the most talked-about tech company at the moment. Focal point seems to be the antenna, with the phone’s reception/lack of reception being discussed *yawns* ad infinitum. “There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.” said Steve Jobs in an email to an iPhone user. It’s already been jailbroken, reports Gizmodo, but no dice on an unlocking tool being released that soon, as it contains some of Apple’s proprietary code. Oh, and did I mention FaceTime? Um, if I were to say FaceTime and Craigslist hookup, what would you say? You’re right. Too early.

5. The Large Hadron Collider, that impossibly complicated bit of tech that runs beneath parts of Switzerland and France, is in the record books again. It’s smashed the particle collision rate record and, while still not as fast as the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois, is expected to overtake it sooner rather than later.

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About the author

My writing career has taken me all round the houses over the past decade and a half--from grumpy teens and hungover rock bands in the U.K., where I was born, via celebrity interviews, health, tech and fashion in Madrid and Paris, before returning to London, where I now live. For the past five years I've been writing about technology and innovation for U.S.